Alison James and Jennifer K. Mann’s inversion of The Giving Tree begins with a nod to Shel Silverstein’s enduring, controversial classic: “Once there was a tree who was very lonely.” Things change when a distressed girl named Rosemary rushes, in tears, across the field to the sugar maple. Children at the nearby school have hurt her feelings, and Maple offers her friendship. Their bond deepens as Rosemary visits daily; she even plants some maple seeds beneath her friend’s branches.

When Rosemary suddenly stops visiting, Maple grieves, but as seasons and years pass, she manages to bloom and grow anyway. The eager saplings shooting up under Maple’s brilliant leaves also mature. Finally, Rosemary returns, now a grown woman, to tell Maple that she’s become a teacher at the school. She hangs a swing from one of Maple’s branches and introduces her students to her old friend. In the end, we see Rosemary as an older woman, her dark hair white with age. She settles next to Maple with a book and, beneath the sheltering leaves, reads aloud to the tree.

With touching emotional authenticity, Maple & Rosemary explores the bonds of friendship and the promises it entails. James portrays conversations between Rosemary and Maple in straightforward dialogue, as though Maple is actually speaking and Rosemary can understand her. When Rosemary’s visits cease, James writes that Maple “ached with loneliness,” because “once you have a friend, you know what you are missing when they are gone.”

Mann’s artwork seamlessly complements James’ vivid text. When we first meet Rosemary, James describes her from Maple’s perspective as something “raining from its eyes” and moving “bright and fast like a shooting star.” Mann brings the story to the page with lush landscapes filled with greens of every shade. She captures Maple beautifully throughout the seasons, and her occasional use of panels expertly progresses the pacing as needed. “Leaves bloomed, burned, then fell,” we read as Mann depicts pink-tipped buds, then verdant green leaves and finally the fiery reds of autumn.  

This tender story is essential reading for tree-whisperers everywhere.

Dani’s drab days are revived by color and beauty when a tree is planted in the “sometimes dusty, sometimes puddly” hole in the sidewalk in front of her home. Now, instead of waking each morning to the clamorous cacophony of city traffic, Dani greets her day with birdsong from nesting friends outside her window. 

Dani quickly learns that the tree is so much more than just a tree: It’s also a helpful guide to dressing for the weather (“leaves fluttering said breezy today . . . branches bending said bundle up”), a soothing, protective presence against the city’s noise and pollution and a listening ear for Dani’s “stories, wonders, worries” and more. 

Some people don’t seem to appreciate the tree as much as Dani does. She finds signs tacked to its bark and trash dumped around its trunk, and she even sees a dog doing its business beneath its branches! But Dani and a group of kindhearted neighbors work together to care for the tree so that everyone will be able to enjoy it for years to come. 

The City Tree highlights a special relationship that will be instantly recognizable to any child who has their own beloved city tree. Author Shira Boss’ text is lovely and engaging, filled with creative and vivid turns of phrase. Dani’s sidewalk is “a carpet of concrete,” for instance, and when winter comes, the tree’s bare branches “rested like paintbrushes in a cup.” Four pages of illustrated back matter elaborate on the importance of urban trees and how city dwellers can support such trees, providing resources for further investigation. 

Illustrator Lorena Alvarez goes above and beyond to make The City Tree shine, telling her own story right alongside Boss’ prose. She builds a wonderful contrast between the cold, gray hues of Dani’s city street that give way to the slow spread of bright, saturated colors once the tree is planted. Page by page, the windows of the buildings around the tree fill with more people following creative pursuits—bakers, sculptors, musicians, designers, all seemingly inspired by the new burst of life heralded by the tree. Alvarez also incorporates subtle examples of all the ways the neighborhood cares for the tree, from building birdhouses and planting flowers around its base to picking up litter and recycling. 

It can be easy to imagine cities as places disconnected from the natural world, but The City Tree is an excellent reminder that nature can flourish wherever it’s nurtured—even outside your own window. 

This Is the Planet Where I Live is the perfect way to jump-start a young environmentalist’s education. Its eye-catching illustrations will capture the reader’s attention, and its lively text will hold it. This is the sort of book that grows alongside children, gaining broader, deeper meanings as their comprehension develops. 

Author K.L. Going writes in rhythmic, occasionally rhyming cumulative verse that focuses on connections. “Here are the people / who share the planet / where I live,” she begins. On the next spread, she continues, “These are the homes / that shelter the people / who share the planet / where I live.” Page by page, Going explores the links between humans, animals, insects, birds, trees, clouds and oceans, her plainspoken verses becoming more complex with each new addition. Finally, she concludes quite simply, “Animals, fields, / shelter for friends, / every creature alive / on each other depends— / all on the planet / where we live.”

Debra Frasier’s dazzling photo-collage art transforms Going’s text into a visual feast for the imagination. Her illustrations will remind many readers of her work in On the Day You Were Born, her beloved 1991 picture book that also makes wonderful use of planetary imagery and themes of interconnectedness. Here, repeated images of Earth and a sunflower-bright sun provide a grounding motif that echoes Going’s cumulative lines, helping young readers realize how all the things mentioned in Going’s text—included readers themselves—rely on one another. 

Along the way, Frasier portrays fascinating variety within each category, such as fields of food that include tomatoes, broccoli, strawberries and onions, or birds such as goldfinches, geese, eagles and seagulls. Bright colors leap off the page, adding energy to every spread. Frequent use of swirls and spirals, which can be seen in clouds, landscapes and, notably, a large curlicue of birds looping in the air, reinforces the central notions of interdependence and the circle of life. 

This Is the Planet Where I Live gloriously captures the teeming natural treasures of our beautiful, delicate world. 

Have you ever known it was going to be a bad day from the moment you woke up? Crusty eyes, soggy cereal, itchy tags in your clothes—everything seems to go wrong. And that’s all before you even get to school! A line cutter in class! A missing pudding at lunch! A terrible case of the hiccups! 

Some days are just plain bad, and Chelsea Lin Wallace and Hyewon Yum have captured all that goes wrong for one child in Ode to a Bad Day. With each turn of the page, readers are presented with a new rhyming ode to misfortune: “Oh Oops, / whoops!” begins the lyric to a ruined painting in art class. “Oh Yucky, / your slimy sauce does not smell yummy” goes the ode to a disappointing spaghetti dinner. There’s even a verse to an elusive “Cricket in My Room” that can be heard but never found. (But keep looking! Careful readers will love hunting for the little green bug on nearly every page.) 

Just when we feel “so annoyed,” we are reminded that we are “not destroyed.” After all, the “best part of a baddish day / is when it ends, and I’m OK.”

Hyewon Yum, author-illustrator of the award-winning picture book Mom, It’s My First Day of Kindergarten!, brings her signature style of watercolor and colored pencils to this bad day. She transforms the protagonist’s face into dramatic expressions of frustration, with frowns, pouts and big open-mouth wails. There’s even a perfectly hilarious spread of a classic meltdown in the grocery store’s cereal aisle—something all parents have certainly witnessed.

While most pages show all the things going wrong around the protagonist, Yum cleverly uses occasional spreads to highlight the child’s emotions. In these visually striking moments, the child is shown on their own, their feelings palpable as they stride across a stormy cloud, or grimace amid a shower of rainbow pencil strokes.

Reminiscent of Judith Viorst’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Ode to a Bad Day is wholly relatable and highly engaging, with lively, rolling poetry and rich, charming illustrations. No matter what kind of day it has been, don’t be surprised if young readers want to read this book over and over. 

Carter Higgins delivers another superb concept book in Some of These Are Snails, a natural companion to her elegant 2021 creation, Circle Under Berry. Higgins invites readers to linger over these pages as they classify, sort and organize simple shapes in bright colors. 

The book opens with a double-page spread dominated by two circles: one green, one yellow, with simple embellishments that transform the green into a turtle, the yellow into a snail. “Turtle is a circle,” we read, then, “circle is a snail.” The next spread features six green and orange circles on the verso, while the recto repeats the images of the turtle and the snail, then introduces a yellow square. “Circle circle square” rests below these three shapes. In the spread that follows, the yellow square becomes an elephant; next to it, a square, now blue, is an owl. 

As we continue to turn the pages, Higgins’ text encourages readers to sort by color and shape, and to ascertain how these classifications overlap. We see nine variously colored circles arranged in a three-by-three square; a square whale; triangle birds and mice; a series of circles grouped by both size and color; and more. Occasionally, Higgins addresses readers directly: “can you sort by color? can you sort by size?” then, striking a playful note, “can you sort by shape or find the animal with eyes?” Perhaps the most sophisticated puzzle of all features six animal shapes and asks, “what is one? what is some? where is all and where is none?”

Though the text includes sparse punctuation and no capitalization, it’s satisfyingly rhythmic and filled with pleasing rhymes, both true and slant. It absolutely begs to be shared aloud. Meanwhile, Higgins renders the shapes and the creatures built from those shapes with vibrant collage illustrations. The figures rest on copious white space and evoke the palette and textures of the work of Eric Carle. It all makes for an utterly delightful, visually rich package that will have readers engaging in the types of classification work that form the basis of math skills and enhance memory and problem-solving abilities, too. Best of all, they’ll learn to see the world and its patterns in eye-opening ways. Some of These Are Snails is a must-have for every young reader’s bookshelf.

Matt James demonstrated his skill for writing about hard subjects in a reassuring way in The Funeral (2018), his first picture book as both author and illustrator. He does so again in Tadpoles, which follows a boy who ponders his own changing habitat as he explores a pond formed by rainfall with his father. 

There’s no dearth of children’s books about the topics James explores here—divorce, changing seasons, the life cycles of frogs—but he nimbly imparts a fresh take on all three in an enticingly rich and thoughtful creation. Tadpoles is not quite a science book and not quite a divorce book, in the best possible ways. 

James accomplishes this through the strong voice of his narrator. He establishes the boy’s conversation tone from the very first line: “A kid in my class says she saw a two-headed frog.” The boy reveals that his father disagrees: “My dad says . . . that Sita probably just saw two frogs.” The boy is experiencing all manner of changes, including the arrival of spring rains that create a huge puddle in a field near his school. The boy notes that the field contains “neat old junk that people just left lying around,” such as glass bottles, a rusty bicycle and an upright piano. There’s even an old farm silo, which prompts the boy to confess, “Once, when my dad first moved to his new place, I stood in the silo and yelled every single swear word that I know. I guess I was worried that he wouldn’t love me anymore, but my dad says that some things never change.”

James’ moody art is filled with dark clouds and a wide variety of raindrops, which readers will almost feel splattering against the pages. Flashes of pink, green and the bright yellow of the boy’s raincoat guide the eye as the boy and his father study the pond’s tadpoles and discuss their evolution in detail (endnotes offer additional information). Movement on every page—swimming tadpoles, swirling clouds, curlicues on the back of a metal chair and more—adds interest. The backdrop of ongoing transformation in both the natural and manmade worlds dovetails neatly with the boy’s reflections about his father and their relationship. James’ illustrations show that the neighborhood is changing too, with high-rise buildings and a construction crane near smaller homes and green spaces. As the book ends, the skies are clear and blue as the boy and his father head home. One of the book’s many strengths is James’ comfort with leaving things unsaid and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

Tadpoles is a reassuring reminder that change can bring positive new developments, and that parental love remains constant, even amid great upheaval.